Subotzky Views

• General Goods

To examine life in confinement poses a serious challenge to photographers; attempts to see inside any closed and secretive prison system seem doomed to produce limited results. Still, South Africa's jails exert an unusual fascination, for until recently many viewed the country itself as a gigantic prison for its black majority; furthermore, the country continues to have one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. On his website, the photographer Mikhael Subotzky quotes the most famous of South Africa's former prisoners, Nelson Mandela: It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.

Subotzky has been attracted to the subject of life in South Africa's overcrowded prisons since his student years. His 2004 final-year project at the University of Cape Town included a series of photographs of prisoners, which was entitled Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners), prison slang for being inside; Subotzky presented life behind bars as a microcosm in which human dramas are sharply revealed on both collective and individual levels. In Umjiegwana (The Outside), 2005, his visual inquiry extended to the difficult, often tragic existence of prisoners after their release.

What makes Subotzky's photographs truly engaging and consequential is their documentary yet highly introspective aspect, which derives from their structured but not artificially staged or manipulated nature. Subotzky sensitively reveals daily existence, observing it on an individual level. Each work is descriptively titled and tells its own story in a controlled yet emphatic manner. This drab and hopeless world projects its own need for poetic license, echoed in a mural landscape painting behind a resting prisoner in Jaco, Beaufort West Prison, 2006, or in a bright cartoon of animals and people painted on the wall of a hospital room in Joseph Waits for X-Ray, Beaufort West Hospital, 2006.

Subotzky’s first major project, “Die Vier Hoeke” (“The Four Corners”), on the South African prison system, won a host of awards; he just won the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for “Crime and Punishment in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” He became a Magnum nominee in 2007.